


black mold

by inkandcayenne



Category: True Detective
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-29
Updated: 2015-10-29
Packaged: 2018-04-28 20:05:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5104040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkandcayenne/pseuds/inkandcayenne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If it rains, the damage will probably spread.</p>
            </blockquote>





	black mold

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dienda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dienda/gifts).



> A fill for [Gloria](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Dienda/pseuds/Dienda)'s Halloween prompt: "Rewrite your favourite horror short story with Rust and Marty (or any other TD character) as the protagonist." Much appreciation to [Hannah](http://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde/pseuds/blackeyedblonde) for her help with the process. Feedback is always appreciated!

In the first moments of awareness, my chest expands and dry air drags along the bottom of my lungs like hot desert wind.  The movement lights up three bright hot red points along my left side and I reach toward the source of the pain, only to find I’m pinned down by skeletal hands, cold and sharp.  

Handcuffs.

I’d worn them once before, four years ago.  My partner--I never knew his name, we’d only been riding together three weeks and I was too high the whole time to learn it--put them on me and then threw me into the back of a cruiser while I raved incoherently and writhed around trying to pull my hands free.  I blacked out and awoke the next morning on a hard bench in a 15x15 beige box, staring out at a steel door with nothing but more beige on the other side.  I snarled and threw myself against the bars like a rabid thing.   A lifetime spent under open sky, on open road, had made a wild creature of me; I knew instinctively that I could survive anything except being locked up.  

And so for the next four years, after every fucking nosebleed and motorcycle crash and gun aimed at my head, my guts scrambled by terror and brains scrambled by crank: _better than waking up in jail_ , I'd tell myself.  Even when I saw the pistol drawn and knew I couldn’t get out of the way in time, heard three loud bangs and was rocketed back by an impact I didn’t feel, I knew I’d made the right choice.  

Now the handcuffs sing like a pair of castanets, clattering back and forth between my wristbones and the rails on either side of the bed: _they got you, they finally got you and now you’re never getting out_

 I start screaming and thrashing, until the metal starts to cut into my skin and they have to give me something to make me stop.

\---

After four days Morales finally turns up and explains that I’m not a danger to anyone but myself, and they trade the handcuffs for hospital-issue industrial strength velcro in a dubious shade of tan; quieter, with a firmer grip.

 _When can I go back to work?_  It’s the first thing I’ve said so far that’s a real sentence.  Morales looks away nervously and drops a wilted bouquet on the table.  

Not just yet, Mr. Cohle, the doctor says.  They’re going to transfer me to somewhere else.  Somewhere nice.

\---

Apparently “somewhere nice” is fucking _Lubbock_.

Eight goddamn hours away, a northwest-bound diagonal slash across the largest state in the contiguous US.  Worth the trip, McKenna barks over the phone.  A nice place, Cohle, helluva lot nicer than the one right across town, have you heard about the mental ward at Houston General?  Motherfuckers smearing their shit on the walls over there.

No one’s ever seen McKenna’s fat ass planted anywhere except in a big leather chair on the other side of a placard reading _Chief of the Department of Narcotics_ so I’m pretty sure he knows fuck-all about regional psychiatric care.  I don’t give a shit, I say.  I want to stay in the city.   

I pulled a lot of strings to get you into North Shore, he says.  Even got you a private room.  Anyway, why the fuck you wanna be down here anyway after all the shit that went down?  Anything _good_ ever happen to you here in Houston, Cohle?

I pause just long enough to let him know that one was over the fucking line.  I can practically hear the sonofabitch sweating over the phone.

That’s not the fucking point, I say.  I should stay close to work.  How long until I get to come back?

He’s quiet for a minute.

Best you stay up there in Lubbock awhile, he says.  

Best for everybody.

\---

After that last trip, strapped to the gurney, screaming and riddled with holes, sitting up in the back of an ambulance feels almost like a luxury. If I lean forward--it hurts where the stitches pull, but it’s worth it--I can see out the back window, blueblack rain dotting the asphalt and blowing back against the glass.  On the sides of the road, pines, dark green.  They match the insides of my wrists where the restraints left broad ribbons of bruise.

It’s nice to see some color.   

\---

 _Soft beds make for soft men_ , Pop always said.  Well, this one’s soft as river rock; I can feel springs jutting up against the thin fabric of the mattress same way I feel staples and wires holding my ribs together, just under the threadbare surface of my skin.  Other than that I’m not crazy (ha! _crazy_ ) about the room, with its pale walls and colorless linoleum.  It’s not white like the white of clean sheets or clouds on a pleasant day; not a warm egg-white or the cold bluish color of a sky over snow.  Devoid of temperature, like a corpse.  The bloodless hue of bleached bones in the desert.    

Ugly fucking color, I mutter.  The orderly sets a stack of folded sheets on my bed and gives me a sidelong look.  They call it antique cream, he says.  I've got a few things to say about how paradoxical and inherently revolting that name is but I’m too fucking tired to get into it.

It’s a state-of-the-art facility, they say.  I’m very lucky to be here.  I’ll get the very best care (although what I’m being treated for isn’t exactly clear: terminal fuckupedness? chronic embarrassment to regional and national institutions?).  There’s nothing wrong with me, they say, other than a shitton of chemicals in my system and three half-healed hollows in my side.  Nothing that a little rest won’t fix.  

I smile and nod to make them stop talking.  I’m just glad not to be strapped down anymore.  

Do you have any questions, Mr. Cohle?

_When can I go back to work?_

The therapist smiles at me the way a kindergarten teacher would at a particularly stupid child.

\---

I ask for my books, but no one’s quite sure where my things are.  I had an apartment near the station for a bit, just before I went under for good--didn’t want to be alone in that two-bedroom house, with its echoes in the corners and crayon still scrawled on the walls.  

Goddamn, man.  Don’t think about that shit.

Most of my stuff went into that old Ford I was driving at the time, but I can’t remember if I ever unpacked it.  The car’s probably under an overpass somewhere, with a hypodermic in the glove box and my books rotting away in the trunk.  

It’s for the best, they say.  That kind of mental stimulation will just tire you out. This is a time for rest and reflection.  

I thought reflection was my fucking problem.  You think too much, everyone’s always told me.  Especially Claire.   _Where are you_ , she’d say, when I got caught up in my own thoughts; or: _where’d you go?_

Where’d you go, Rust.  

Where’d you go.

\---

I ask the orderly for advice on how to pass the time.  Dunno, man, he says.  Do what the rest of these head cases do, I guess.  Just stare at the fucking wall.

\---

After six days, devoid of other options, just as an experiment, I stare at the fucking wall.

It’s actually not as boring as I first thought--the blank huelessness of it, I mean.  There’s a sort of disturbance under the paint, three squiggly lines starting in the upper right-hand corner of the room and tracing left and downward in tentative trails like a river on a map.  

What the fuck is that? I ask the orderly.  Charles.  His name is Charles.  

What?  

 _That_.  I point up into the corner.  

Water damage, I reckon, he says, squinting.  Probably not gonna get fixed anytime soon.  Everything around here’s been fucked up since Reagan’s reforms.  If it rains the damage will probably spread.  

I guess I could always watch it and see what develops.  

Just to have something to do.

\---

Charles collects my laundry on Wednesdays and returns it, clean, the following Monday.  He sweeps the floor once every five days and mops it every other week.  I wish he wouldn’t; if my old man could see someone cleaning up after me he’d rise up out of the grave and kick my ass from here to the Aleutians. _A man who can’t do for himself doesn’t deserve the air that populates his lungs_ , he whispers somewhere behind my left ear.  

It’s my job, Charles says.  Don’t make trouble.

I’m not allowed to do _anything_ \--not prepare my own food, wash my own clothes.  Exercise is a half-hour stroll around the yard-- _no running_ \--and then it’s a series of chairs and couches where we sit passively as the wisdom of the therapists or the crazed meanderings of our fellow nutjobs fills the air, or--worse still--sit in silence and _reflect_.  And then back to my room to stare at those three hesitant little rain-trails at the top of the wall.

This is enough to drive anybody nuts, if they weren’t already.  At least I had my books to see me through the endless blank-white winters of my childhood.

You’ve got books here, they tell me.  The library--that’s what they call it, the _library_ , a rickety card table and half-collapsed shelf filled with romance novels, Bibles, and six copies of _A Time to Kill_.  You can’t take them back to your room, not since the incident with the guy who was jerking off into some of the more disturbing passages in the book of Job.  They must be read at the table, which is sandwiched between two couches filled with drooling lunatics in the common room, where the TV blares day and night.  

Maybe you could take a nap, they say, as if I’ve ever taken a nap in my fucking life.  A rest would do you good--

That’s the last fucking thing I need, I sputter.  I need to trace a line of pollen tracked in from an unsub’s boot, a stack of depositions, a streak of rubber from a mobile meth lab’s tire-track.  I need to work a _case_.

Your insistence at being put back into a line of work that almost killed you, they reply, demonstrates how far you have to go in your recovery.  

\---

The damage is spreading.

Not by much.  Not so much as most would notice.  But noticing is what I do, after all.  Tracks in the snow.  Fingerprints along a windowsill.  The twitch in the eye just before a gun is pulled.

I would say it’s about three-quarters of an inch longer along the second line, two and a half inches on the third one.  Two new lines now, on the lower edge, approximately a half-inch each.  It’s hard to say; this ceiling’s probably fifteen feet high, and the only light coming in is from a six-inch window near the top.  But I’d say a half-inch each.  That makes five total, reaching out like a hand.

One spring I went out to the shed behind the house and there was an old blanket of an uncertain grayish color, cast to the floor and forgotten through seven seasons of damp and freeze and thaw and rot.  There were spiders underneath, albino-white, with legs like an old woman’s fingers.  They skittered every which way when the light hit them.  I shrieked and my pop told me to pull myself the fuck together.

I don’t know why I should think of that now.

It’s gotten worse, I tell Charles.  Looks the same to me, he says, and he gives me a _look_.  Just a fleeting one, but too familiar in a place like this.  

I probably shouldn’t mention it again.

\---

How long were you undercover? the therapist asks, as if he doesn’t have my whole psychosis right there in his lap, sandwiched in manila two shades warmer than the paint on the wall.

The last four years, but off and on some months before that, short-term jobs.  Always did this sort of thing ever since I first joined the force.  Never could work a desk.

You thrive on chaos, he says.  

Right, I say, and wait for the punchline.

\---

It’s getting worse.

The damage, I mean.

I don’t know why; it hasn’t been raining.  I don’t _think_ it’s been raining.  I can’t really see the sky in here, though that pathetic excuse for a window casts pale gray rays on the opposite wall ten or twelve hours each day.  When they've sedated me it’s the only way of telling if it’s day or night.

But it can’t have been raining.  We’re in fucking Lubbock.  It’s not the desert, not exactly, but it’s pretty fucking close.

The ripples under the paint are spreading out, starting to crawl down along the wall like sluggish snakes on a cold desert morning.  Twelve of them now, all told.  Fifteen inches at the longest point, the bottom one traveling down and to the left at a fifty-five-degree angle.  But some of them are running straight across the wall, others starting to bend upwards like a leaf the wind picks up just before it hits the ground.  

I try to picture the rain seeping in.  Eating its way along the wall, behind the paint.  Shouldn’t it drip downward?  Why does it run off in all those directions, dipping down and curling back up again in defiance of logic and gravity?

There’s no logic to most things, I know that.  But gravity you can't argue with.  A force--like a bullet or a car--will send you flying through the air in a straight line, but only for so long.  Eventually gravity says _fuck that_ and you crash on the pavement.  

In an alternate universe, her head never hit the concrete with a sickening thud.  Somewhere without Newton's laws, she’s still flying through the air, traveling parallel to the earth just like those lines crawling across the wall.  Getting farther and farther away from me.

\---

After breakfast it’s a therapist, and then a therapist, and then a walk around the yard, and then lunch, and then group therapy, and then group meditation, and then a mandatory hour in the common room with the television blaring.  Every fucking second is planned.  It’s all so exhausting that I actually look forward to coming back here and staring at the wall.  

It wasn’t like this when I was working.  I don’t remember ever feeling tired then.  That’s part of the problem, one of the therapists says, and taps his nose.  

Moron.  I was smoking it, not snorting.

When I’m forced to sit in the common room I look around and pretend I’m on a stakeout.  Scope out the addicts and schizos and pyromaniacs, pretend they’re robbers or dealers or murderers.  Something that makes _sense_.  I blurt that out once, in therapy, when I’ve gone too long without sleep.

Escapism, they say.  Projection.

Deal with your shit, Cohle, Morales says, and hangs up.

I sit up half the night and watch the six topmost lines on the wall, the ones that curl upward.  They’re bending in on themselves, leaning back into the beginnings of spirals.  I follow them with my eyes, round and round, until I’m dizzy.

Where is all this rain coming from?

This _is_ Lubbock, isn’t it?

\---

A new development:

There’s a swelling in the wall in three or four places, underneath the thickest lines in the pattern. It’s coming from behind the paint, sending it out in bulbous dips and humps.  It’s gross-looking and I’ve lived in some gross fucking places.  

I don’t like looking at it.  But when I’m looking at it I’m not thinking about anything else.

It’s bulging slightly, as if something’s pushing at it.  

As if something’s trying to get out.

\---

I use up all my phone privileges calling the station six times in two days.   _He’s away from his desk_ , McKenna’s secretary says.  In the white noise behind her I could swear I hear the creak of a leather chair.

\---

The wall is swelling in five places now.  The largest of them sticks out three-quarters of an inch.  The paint covering them is brittle now; if I run my finger along the edge of the swell, plaster rains down.  I wonder, idly, how much I could get for a kilo of it in Juarez.

It’s been two months.  Just let me go back to work, I beg.  I don’t sound like a man anymore.  I sound like a pleading child.

Maybe a return to law enforcement isn’t in your best interest, they say.  After that they have to give me something to calm me down and they lead me back to my room.  

I can’t let myself think about what will happen if they don’t take me back.  I sit and stare at the wall instead.

Something’s starting to break through.

\---

It’s corruption of some kind.  A fungus, working its way to the surface.  Black mold is starting to spread along the wall in ambivalent little pinpricks like a spray of ink. Not much, not yet, but when it's dark you can see the tiny points coalesce into blots just behind the paint.

I’m sleeping badly lately.  It’s the dreams: soft laughter, loops of crayon along walls, spinning tires.  So I sit up at night and watch the wall instead.  If you follow it you can almost glimpse patterns, forms.  They tell a story, which is not the same thing as having meaning.  

Looking for meaning is a weakness.  You’ll see plenty of patterns in nature, Pop always said, but for every one thing you see coming there’ll be twelve you won’t.  There’s cause and there’s effect, but the day you get to thinking you understand either is the day you should just take off your boots and wander into the woods to die, because the only thing on this green earth you can foresee or control is your own individual ability to cope with the inevitable and unpredictable shitstorm aimed at your head.  

How can something be inevitable and unpredictable at the same time, I said, with a ten-year-old’s haughty wisdom.  Shut up and help me dress this deer, he retorted.

Back then I used to look up at the sky and make up stories, when the winter nights got long.

\---

The pattern is starting to slowly take shape.  I can just make it out; the angle of the window’s all wrong and I can’t see the sky but the light gets in--just a bit.  There’s something in the wall.  A figure taking root there, like a mandrake.  

During the day it’s formless, if you don’t know what you’re looking at.  But at night it shifts, the way an optical illusion does when the candlesticks fall back and faces come into view.  The dark pinpricks of mold grow thick and black until they form a semisolid shape; the white part recedes like a ghost withdrawing from a room.  The shadowy part moves towards you, silent but somehow aggressive.

It looks like a person, kind of.  Like a man, facing away.

\---

Charles caught me staring at the wall today ( _establish your suspect and then wait for him to make his move_ ) and the next day they told me I spend too much time alone.  They’re recommending an adjustment to my regimen.  An extra hour in the common room every evening and then a sedative before bed.

It’s true that I think about it too much.  I can’t help it; I have an analytic mind.  

If they let me go back to work I could put it to some fucking use.  But no one’s asking for my opinion on the matter.

I don’t like being out of the room.  I keep thinking I see him--the guy in the wall.  I feel him crouching in the shadows when I’m in the cafeteria or the common room.  I have to keep looking over my shoulder for him.  

It’s very tiring.  At least in the room I know where he is.

I tongue the white sleeping pill, spit it out, crush it under my heel.  The loosened paint that’s collecting in the corners of the room gives me an easy place to hide it.

Better stay awake so I can keep an eye on him.

\---

There’s a line of plaster dust along the bottom of the wall.  Charles sweeps it up.

You been fuckin’ with the wall, Cohle?

No sir.

Well, don’t, he says. Mold gets into the air, people get sick.

Thought I was already sick, I say.  With a wide smile, to show I am an affable and pleasant individual.

He doesn’t smile back.

\---

An incident in therapy this morning.

It’s been three months, I said.  I’m sober and my wounds are healed.  There’s no reason to keep me here.  Let me out and put me back on the job.  Stop writing in your little book and listen me, okay?  Call McKenna and get me the fuck out of here.  Just fucking _call_ him.  

They said my inability to deal with frustration productively demonstrates that I’m not ready to interact with people.  They told me if I continued to behave aggressively they would be forced to consider restraints.  Then they sent me back to my room.  

He doesn’t seem like he’s facing away anymore, not completely.  The top part of the shape, where it suggests a head and neck, is leaning to one side as if he’s turning to look over his shoulder.  There’s something active in his posture, a panther about to spring.  

There’s a sheen to his skin like leather or tar.   He’s a dry thing, a desert-creature.  All this mildew and rot is choking him.

\---

Charles comes by with my laundry.  The orderlies downstairs asked him to have a word with me.  They keep finding white dust on my clothes; the residue is getting all over everything.  I just stare at him until he leaves.

He’s not turned toward the wall now.  He’s facing outward, reaching toward me with twisted, spindly arms; you can see paint flaking between his fingers.  His eyes are two chips where the mold hasn’t taken over yet, white holes in a black skull.  

He’s pushing his way out.

\---

McKenna called.  Seems my insurance won’t cover more than fifteen weeks.  We don’t think you’re ready, they say, as if they give a shit.

Funny thing is, though, I’m not sure I want to go just now.  Soon, but not yet.  

Not before I see what comes out of that wall.

\---

I’ve been very quiet lately so that they don’t suspect anything.  I’m getting out in three days.

What happened to your hands? they ask.  There’s rough patches where the top layer of skin has been worn clean off.  Plaster under the nails.  Here and there, an infinitesimal speck of white paint.

I don’t know, I say.

\---

I’m leaving in the morning.  Charles comes by with my last meal.

Is that mold? he says, peering at the wall.

As if he couldn't see him!

Gonna have to do something about this, he says.  Could be a health hazard.  Once you’re out of here I’ll have maintenance come deal with it.

I know what they’re trying to do.  They’re gonna put him back in the wall.  Scrub him clean with chemicals and cover him up with a coat of institutional white.  He’ll never be able to get out if they do that.

I won’t let it happen.  I’m gonna get him out of here.

I never should have let him get caught in the first place.

\---

The light starts to seep through the tiny window at a quarter after six.  I’m leaving at ten. That’s just enough time.

I lift up the rickety metal bedframe and pound it against the floor until one leg bends and twists and I can wrench it free.  I’ll use the rough end to scrape off what’s left of the paint.  There’s not much left now; he’s knocked most of it off.  

The noise brings them running, but it doesn’t matter now.  They can pound on the door all they want.  I’ve jammed the doorknob with a sliver of wire I pocketed from the maintenance guy’s cart last week.

The ragged metal edge scrapes against my palms, leaving smears of blood along the wall.  

That should do it.  He can do the rest on his own now.  His long, spindly limbs are wrenching free like black branches being dragged from a frozen pond.  

The wood of the door is bulging now, same way the paint used to.  It will be quicker for them to break in than it was for him to break out.  But no matter, he’s ready for them--crouched on a chair behind the door now, clutching that metal leg like a baseball bat in his bleeding hands.  

The door splinters, then bursts open.  Three orderlies, two therapists and a security guard look frantically around the empty room.

 _You ain’t puttin’ me back in there, motherfucker_ , Crash says, and brings the steel rod swinging down in a deadly arc.

**Author's Note:**

> My inspiration here is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “[The Yellow Wallpaper](http://csivc.csi.cuny.edu/history/files/lavender/wallpaper.html),” a short story based on the author’s experiences with the “rest cure” in the early 20th century. It was a particularly popular treatment for women with mental health issues, and required the patient to live a very sedentary life and avoid any kind of intellectual stimulation. Unsurprisingly, it drove people crazy rather than curing them. The story’s protagonist, with nothing to do but stare at the wallpaper, starts to imagine that its pattern is a woman trapped beneath the paper; the end of the story suggests that she's come to believe that she _is_ the woman. 
> 
> We see on the show that Rust copes with his considerable mental distress by throwing himself into work. It’s not the healthiest coping mechanism, but I think having it ripped out from under him--as it would have been when he suddenly transitions from Crash to North Shore mental patient--would have been horrible, and probably would have caused his psyche more harm than good.


End file.
